Baby Face Killa Review

By 2012 the argument about Gibbs is settled among people who listen closely and nowhere else, and this is the tape built to close that gap. The beats are the sharpest he has been handed to this point, mixed to survive a car stereo instead of a laptop, and the board credits run from Statik Selektah to Cookin' Soul to DJ Dahi to DJ Mustard, which is a wider stylistic reach than a Gary gangsta rapper is supposed to attempt. It is the first Gibbs tape you can hand to a casual listener without apologizing for the way it sounds.

BFK opens it hard. Kush Cloud and The Diet sit in exactly the pocket he owns, unhurried and mean, and the Boxframe Cadillac remix is the best argument here for his ear. What holds the record at very good is the writing. Dope, guns and loyalty, handled with enormous craft and almost no new angle, stretched across eighteen tracks that could lose six without losing anything. The production sits a tier above the record it serves, which is a strange thing to say about a rapper this good. Played in a car it is close to unbeatable. Played straight through it flattens.